As it happened, Friday the 13th fell on a Sunday this month, and so I did the prudent thing yesterday morning: I lay late abed, avoiding as many opportunities for mischance as I could. While musing on this and that, the word “rebarbative” somehow swam into mind. (Let me just note here that after I had typed “rebarbative,” Microsoft Word informed me that it knows of no such word and so it appears on my screen underlined in squiggly red. Stupid software.)

(Now it tells me that “Stupid software” is a sentence fragment and wonders if I’d consider revising. No, thanks; it’s a style thing.)

Where was I? Ah, yes, rebarbative. It’s one of those words whose meaning I simply cannot retain. I have no idea how many times I’ve looked it up in the dictionary. The first time was almost surely after hearing William F. Buckley say it. I wouldn’t bet that anyone else ever has. I’m looking it up again right now, and it means “repellent, irritating.” Like Microsoft Word, for example. Somehow it has come to mean that after deriving from a Latin root meaning “beard.” I wear a beard, so I’m wondering if that figures into my seeming inability to remember what this word means. Why trouble to know a word that turns around and insults one?

No such consideration can excuse my difficulty with “lugubrious.” I do recall when I first saw that one. A classmate in high school wrote in my yearbook “The vicissitudes of life are very lugubrious.” Yes, he was a showoff. Now, “vicissitude” doesn’t give me a problem, and I can even spell it without reference to Merriam-Webster. But “lugubrious” will not lodge in my brain. It means – I’m looking at page 692 of my Collegiate as I write – mournful or dismal, especially to an exaggerated degree. So the showoff was writing more or less nonsense to boot. I’d expected as much.

Condign. One of that family of words derived from Latin by way of French in which the “g” has somehow become silent, yet is still required for correct spelling: align, assign, benign, design, malign, and so on. It means “deserved, appropriate.”

Anfractuous. Even if, as I hope, the effort of writing this little essay serves to implant one of these words at long last in my brain, I’m pretty sure it won’t be this one.

But who can say? Perhaps a vicissitude will occur that isn’t rebarbative and I won’t have to put on a lugubrious face. Wouldn’t that be condign?

(A respectful hat tip to the late Mrs. Tera Kidwell, senior English, who did manage to pound a few other words in where these have feared to go.)